


Battered, Singed & Nailed

by officialchildermass



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Curses, Enchantment, I suck at coming up with names, Ormskirk!, faerie - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-11
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2018-04-04 00:07:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4119508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/officialchildermass/pseuds/officialchildermass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Look, Bell,” Jonathan Strange had said to his wife, not five minutes before. “We are quite safe here. No fairie armies on the King’s Roads in the Mirrors. Just as desolate as I told you they were."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Well, this was odd.

“Look, Bell,” Jonathan Strange had said to his wife, not five minutes before. “We are quite safe here. No fairie armies on the King’s Roads in the Mirrors. Just as desolate as I told you they were. However,” he muttered, turning this way and that, “this is quite a different landscape from the last time I was here.”

Quite different indeed. The journey from London to Hampstead through the mirrors had led Strange over a dark bridge, stretching miles into blackness, in all directions. Now, Mr and Mrs Strange, accompanied by Childermass[1], found themselves in a dreary landscape. It reminded the Stranges of Shropshire, and the hills leading into Wales. To Childermass, on the other hand, it seemed remarkably like the landscape surrounding York. This shewed again the inscrutable nature of Fairie.

A persistent drizzle had dampened their clothes upon the moment of arrival. After the first few minutes of careful exploration, they had become quite soaked, much to everyone’s displeasure (although to no-one’s surprise). Arabella had taken her scarf from around her neck and tied it over her hair, but it offered little comfort, as it was almost whisked away by the steadily blowing wind.

For Childermass, the presence of a fierce headache added to his discomfort.

Thunder clapped in the dark skies above them.

The air itself was electrified; a wisp of fluff coming from who-knows-where drifted up in the current, drafted along by a mystical gale. For a moment it was the only thing that moved.

What was _odd_ , was that the fluff was struck by thunder and went up in flame – for less than a second, then it disappeared and its microscopic flakes of dust were scattered on the air.

Arabella gasped, and Jonathan motioned to pull his wife behind himself.

“Do _not_ move,” warned Childermass, through a clenched jaw.

He started blinking rapidly. The headache that had been pounding behind his eyes since they entered the Roads flared up and he gasped for breath like a fish on the dry.

 _The sky wailed, howled with an unbidden rage. Clouds gathered above the streams that thundered down the rocky hills, and the downpour from them made the rivers tread out of their bounds. It was a landscape he knew well; Yorkshire highland, with Hurtfew Abbey lying at its core_.

Not again, he thought, trying to make sense of what he just saw. Not now, he pleaded; to whom, he did not know. The smell of gunpowder and the sense of a bullet piercing his flesh, bones and muscles flashed before him. Not _again_ , he beseeched. Childermass came back to himself with a start.

“Childermass?” Strange asked, a hint of concern weaving in and out of his voice.

“Magic is done here.”

Childermass carefully turned his head, but stopped dead in his tracks when he felt a current of something _electrical_ crackle along his hair, faint long fiery fingers of heat brushing his cheek.

A moment later he smelled singed flesh and the sudden nauseating pain of a burn.

Through his teeth he hissed, “ _fairie_ magic.”

“AH!” a sudden outcry came from the behind a rock, a rock which had previously not been there.

Arabella gasped and Childermass heard Jonathan mutter some kind of obscenity which will not be repeated here.

A lady rose from – what had appeared to be a rock, but was actually the pleats of a magnificent dress. The dress was a dark kind of grey, but upon closer examination appeared to shift hues, depending on the colour of the ground the lady stood upon.

Her hair fell in waves around her face and on her shoulders. It was black, almost too black to see, and Childermass thought he saw feathers sticking out of it, but then he blinked, and her hair was just that – hair.

She glided towards Childermass and circled around him; he noticed that a heat seemed to radiate off of her. Childermass’s nostrils flared, and the pounding inside his head started up again – he wanted to keep an eye on the lady but his eyes still prickled from the pain that his previous movement caused.

“You caught on,” the lady said haughtily. “Who would have expected that from the _servant_ of the First Greatest Magician of the Age? On the other hand, since we find ourselves in Fairie, it does not require the brain of a genius to figure it out.”

She snorted, then cackled, walking backwards and away from Childermass. “But! Oh, I forget,” she said, sounding absent-mindedly, “you have had some dealings with my cousin, of course.”

Childermass’s mind raced. He could not remember dealing with anyone so astoundingly beautiful before – again he blinked. _What?_

He bit his tongue, then tentatively said, “another gentleman or lady of your exquisite kind, you mean?” As natural as afterthoughts come, he added, “my dear lady?”

She looked at him from an elevated position. How she suddenly came to be taller than Childermass was a mystery to him. He had the faint notion of Strange hissing something at him, but he was enraptured by the lady’s beauty and grandeur.

When she spoke again, his headache faded a fraction.

“Of course, do you not remember the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair? He is my third cousin by marriage.”

He dully realised that she could not keep up her enchantment over him while speaking. The trick, then, was to keep her talking.

Unfortunately, this notion fled his thoughts again when she waited for him to answer, and flashes of a man with silvery hair danced before his eyes. Childermass forgot that she had enchanted him, forgot that he should not move, forgot that Arabella and Jonathan Strange _and_ he were in considerable (if not mortal) danger. He even forgot Arabella and Jonathan were present.

All he saw were ravens flying from the lady’s hair.

_A flock of them, descending upon him, flapping their wings and blackening his vision, their cawing filling his ears – then they turned into a swarm of bees, buzzing around his head._

He tasted something salty – had he bitten his tongue again and drawn blood this time?

_The moon was placed at his eyes._

Childermass knew he was not supposed to observe what happened next.

 _He saw himself in a thicket of trees, walking here and there, edging around trees until he reached a glade, filled with soft, golden light. On the other end of the glade, opposite himself, stood a gentleman. Childermass hovered above a different version of John Childermass and saw himself taking his heart out of the inner pocket of his coat. He handed the man his heart. The man held it in his hands and absorbed its light, through peeling away layers of shadows, past thievery, moral and ethnic disregard, and last of all, doubt, and uncovered its love_.

Again, a flash of pain brought him back to his senses. He discovered he was lying on the ground, and when he tried to get up another wave of pain seemed intent on keeping him down. He looked to his right and made the rather nauseating discovery that his hand was nailed into the earth.

He lifted his gaze and saw the empty bodice of a dress hovering above the ground, supported by a mass of stone that looked strikingly like the folds of the dress the lady had been wearing.

He did not comprehend.

Turning his head to the left, he saw Jonathan and Arabella hovering above him.

Then he realised.

“Ormskirk[2],” Childermass spat. “Cruel.”

“But effective,” Strange said – but to Childermass’s slight satisfaction, he looked rather pale, under the splatters of (supposedly) Childermass’s blood.

“Come. Let’s get you… free, and let’s leave this place.”

Childermass did not protest.

“Jonathan,” Arabella said, her voice quavering with anger, “I am _not_ convinced.”

 

_footnotes_

[1] Arabella was still not convinced the Roads were safe. Therefore, Jonathan proposed to take her there. She consented, after much arguing, but only under the condition that they would be accompanied by another magician. This posed a problem for Jonathan; Mr Norrell was the only other magician, but he would shriek and balk at the very first mention of the Raven King, his roads, or as of late, mirrors in general. That was when Childermass presented himself. Strange jumped at the opportunity, readily accepting his proposal, and Arabella had to concur. Childermass had as much to offer by joining this endeavour as to gain, of course.

[2] Jonathan Strange used a spell he had used before on King George III (with a dubious amount of success).  The spell was a prescription by Ormskirk, in his Revelations of Thirty-Six Other Worlds, which  would dispel illusions and correct wrong ideas. Some improvisation was necessary, however, as any nail of any kind of metal was not present. Strange had taken his wife’s scarf – which was _red_ – and wrapped it around Childermass’s arm. Then he had yanked the hair pin out of his wife’s up-do to slam it through Childermass’s hand.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three conversations, only more questions.

Despite weakness from the pain and the loss of blood, he had been relatively fine, when the Stranges carried him out of the mirror and back into England.

Really, he had been.

But now, lying in his bed in Hanover Square, his nailed hand roughly bandaged with Arabella’s scarf, Childermass was speaking gibberish.

Mr Norrell had had a massive fright when his servant, pupil, and pupil’s wife fell out of the large mirror in his library, where he had been enthusiastically lecturing a dumbstruck John Segundus (who had in fact been looking for Strange) on the advantages of studying Sutton-Grove’s lists. However, Norrell quickly recovered, and identified that what Childermass was saying was in fact an existing language, which happened to be Dutch. Mr Norrell ascertained everyone that Childermass did not know this language and the fact that he was speaking it was, according to him, thus caused by some kind of yet unspecified unnatural event.

Arabella sent Lucas, one of Mr Norrell's footmen, out to search for a physician, and afterwards she, her husband and Mr Norrell gathered around Childermass’s bed, in various stages of concern. Childermass’s lips were rapidly moving, but his quiet mumbling was barely intelligible – not that he would have been intelligible had he spoken up, mind.

Mr Norrell was driving Jonathan to despair with endless questions about where they went, why they went, what had happened, how it had happened, et cetera, et cetera. Meanwhile Arabella was dabbing Childermass’s sweaty face and neck with a damp rag.

“Laat jalousie u nimmer plagen,” said Childermass, suddenly out loud. “Wyl dezen u verscheurd het hart.”

“What in _God’s name_ is he saying?” cried Mr Norrell desperately.

“Forgive me, sir, but like you, I do not speak Dutch,” Strange said through clenched teeth.

The tension in the room was only broken by the stumbled entry of Mr Segundus, his arms full of twigs. Strange perked up from his slumped position by Childermass’s bedside, and his eyes grew wide.

Mr Norrell and Arabella looked on in baffled silence while Mr Segundus started arranging the twigs in complex geometrical patterns around the room.

“What—” Mr Norrell started.

“Calm, sir,” Strange said. “Let him try.”

Arabella left the room and went downstairs to see if the physician had arrived yet, but Strange observed Segundus carefully. He saw that the twigs emitted a faint glow, and he observed they had magical properties, but had he been asked to describe them, he would have been unable to do so. He felt a sense of familiarity about them, but he could not pin down from whence such a feeling might have sprung.

Then he realised the magic surrounding the twigs was his own.

Segundus had finished and sat down on the bed next to Childermass, who was still rambling on, oblivious to his surroundings.[1]

Mr Segundus brushed the fingers of his right hand against Childermass’s lips, mumbling a Latin incantation, ending with a sudden loud plea: “ _O anime! Hoc corpus relinque!_ ”[2]

During those final words, Segundus jerked his hand upwards.

Childermass's body cramped and contorted, and all his muscles tensed up, hollowing his back to such an extent that he rose off of the bed. His hands clawed the sheets in pain.

The room seemed to grow darker around the ones present – the candles had not exactly gone out, but failed to give adequate light; the curtains were still open, but the fading of the daylight had accelerated, and the sky outside only projected a dull, grey shadow on the bedroom's wooden floor. The only light seemed to radiate from Segundus's eyes and hands

Childermass opened his mouth in a wordless scream, and something shiny and blue escaped from his mouth. John Segundus trapped the orb within his hands.

With something between a strangled cry and a sigh, Norrell started, “Chi—” but Strange silenced him by placing a hand on his arm, realising this was not a time for interruption and questioning.

Segundus desperately tried to do – something, of which he himself did not seem quite sure. He shook his clenched-together hands, a faint blue-ish light seeping through the cracks between his fingers. Then he spread his hands before him and splayed out his fingers, and shook them like one tries to dry of their hands without a towel present. The orb’s encasing seemed to have broken, its contents behaving like water, and the light dripped from Segundus's hands.

A low moan escaped from Childermass, who was no longer trashing around in the sheets but remained painfully still and tense, which somehow looked worse.

Only Strange recognised this as something _resembling_ rigor mortis, as neither Mr Norrell nor Mr Segundus had seen a dead body, while Strange had seen plenty in the Peninsula. Of course, rigor mortis did not set in until a few hours after one’s death, but these circumstances were… unusual, without a doubt.

Segundus then blew on his fingers and the blue shine reappeared. He seemed content as he put his hands together around it and brought them to Childermass's face.

While he was doing this, the door fell open again, this time to admit Arabella, Lucas and Dr Goodsmith, the physician.

Childermass absorbed the light and fell back onto the bed, shuddering and heaving, and incredibly pale.

As if struck by thunder, he shot upright and, bewildered, stared at the odd gathering around his bed. His gaze lingered on Segundus and he tried to speak, but before he could utter anything meaningful his eyes rolled back into his head and he fell back down, once again.

Dr Goodsmith ran over and shooed Segundus away, who was then immediately taken into custody by Mr Norrell and Strange, who asked him all kinds of questions.

The physician harrumphed – the room went silent – and declared he demanded privacy with the patient, and everyone filed out of the room under Goodsmith's stern look.

The moment they were out of the room, the waterfall of questions started up again.

“Well,” started John Segundus, as he was herded towards Norrell's library (where the rest of the ensemble followed, for lack of purpose and a need for company), “I think I... removed his soul from his body temporarily...”

Upon hearing this, Arabella seemed rather like she was the next to faint.

“And then, I _shook off_ the curse, as it were. It was quite straightforward, actually, once I had seen the blackness surrounding his mouth, as I'm sure you did notice–”

At this, Mr Norrell and Strange exchanged a confused stare.[3]

“—I suppose that was caused by the Dutch language... since it's...”

Here Mr Segundus's innate kindheartedness prevented him from saying Dutch was a foul language, (although it is a fact to which the present author can heartily contend) but it did not matter what he did or did not say, as he was quickly about to succumb to renewed questioning by Norrell and Strange.

Arabella removed herself from the room, and with some guilt left Segundus to fend for himself. She made her way back to Childermass's room, which she entered as, upon opening the door a chink, she found it devoid of physicians.

**

Childermass awoke to the feeling of something pleasantly cold against his neck.

He groggily opened his eyes and, in the brightness of the morning peeping through the half-opened curtains, saw the shape of Arabella Strange sitting at his left side. She was in the process of wetting rags and placing them on his forehead and in his neck.

Once he had blinked the blurriness of sleep away from his vision, he raised his head and laid eyes on the most guilty-looking face he had seen in a while.

“Mrs Strange,” Childermass mumbled, after the muscles in his face had remembered how to speak good proper Yorkshire _English_ again.

Arabella blew out some long-held breath. “Childermass— thank goodness. How... how are you feeling?” she asked after some hesitation.

That was a question which was surprisingly hard to answer, as he felt... off. He felt like a part of him was missing, somehow.

However, he saw her need for confirmation of his well-being, because she probably felt partly responsible for the curse that had been placed upon him. After all, it had been she who had felt the need to ascertain that the Raven King's Roads were safe (in a blank spot in the back of his mind, Childermass vaguely wondered how that conversation between Jonathan and Arabella had played out, after their merry band of adventurers had returned with a cursed and wounded member).

Childermass raised a hand, gingerly, as if to tell her to ease her mind, but then he saw a bandage wrapped around his hand and the memory of the pain hit him with such force he was for a moment unable to speak, and he squinted his eyes and let his head fall back on the pillow.

“Can I do anything for you?” came the worried voice of Arabella.

“I was actually hoping to ask for a favour,” muttered Childermass, opening his eyes slightly. “Could you tell me if Mr Segundus is still present at Hanover Square? I would much like to speak to him.” This utterance fatigued greatly, and he closed his eyes again and he sighed, and somewhere within his clouded mind he felt annoyed at being so indisposed. He wondered how much laudanum Goodsmith had poured into him this time.

Arabella's short, soft laugh was cause enough, however, to make him open his eyes yet again. “Had my husband and your master not been plaguing Mr Segundus with a hundred questions about his treatment of you, I am confident he would have spent his every waking moment at your bedside. He seems both immensely relieved that... _whatever he did_ worked, as well as wrecked with worry that something might have gone wrong. He stayed up this night to look after you, and I will make sure that he is the first to hear of your awaking.

That meant he had slept through the evening and the night. That explained the dryness of his mouth.

As if Arabella could read his thoughts, she stood up and poured some water from a decanter into a cup, which she handed to him. Childermass was pleased at her way of treating him. Although her concern was excessive, he appreciated the gesture; but at least she did not treat him like a complete invalid.

He drank. He tasted laudanum.

She took back the cup from his limp fingers and Childermass slowly slipped away into sleep again.

**

He awoke and opened his eyes to see not Arabella Strange, or John Segundus as he had hoped, but Gilbert Norrell, standing at his window.

Childermass cleared his throat to indicate he was awake.

“Why did you accompany Strange into the accursed mirrors?” Mr Norrell asked, sounding tired. He was still looking outside, at the bustle in the square at noon, the sound of which barely registered with Childermass.

He was not even surprised at Norrell's blunt way of treating him – not anymore.

This question likely deserved a delicate answer if Childermass was not to find himself sacked and on the streets first thing tomorrow morning. He was painfully aware of the precarious balance between honesty and whatever Norrell wanted to hear.

“Study, sir,” he eventually said.

Only now did Norrell turn around. “Explain yourself,” he said.

“Did you not hire me, sir, to have an assistant for your business of magic? I know,” he interrupted himself, “not initially, but I quickly adopted that role, did I not?”

Mr Norrell gave him a hesitant nod.

“I felt that I would fall short of my duties towards you were I not to investigate a matter of magic which you yourself would not take up. Mr Strange asked me to accompany him and I thought it safe enough, as he has had firsthand, albeit small, experience on the roads. I know now,” with a wry smile, “that I was quite wrong, but I felt I _had to see it for myself_ , sir. I needed–”

“Have you listened to nothing I have told you during the last four-and-twenty years, Childermass?” cried Norrell, exasperatedly. “This is exactly what I have been warning you and Strange for, all along, together with the rest of England.”

Childermass raised an eyebrow and waited for silence. When it came, he said, “quite so, sir, and while I remain your loyal servant, I needed to _see it_. I remember when I got shot and saw Faerie,” here Childermass raised his voice as he saw Mr Norrell was about to protest, but he wanted to get his point across, “and I felt the magic all around me. In the sky, the stone, the rain and the grass. Exactly _because_ I am your servant, I felt I needed to be able to show you an _alternative_ if there indeed is one.”

He paused. He became aware of the same sensation that had grabbed hold of him earlier this day, when he was speaking with Arabella. He felt empty.

He might have ascribed it to the side-effects of the laudanum, but his previous experiences[4] with it had never yielded this feeling before, so he cast that possibility aside. Unfortunately, that did not bring him closer to an answer.

“Well!” Norrell said, dumbstruck. “Frankly, I cannot believe your, your _idiocy_ at agreeing to be part of such an undertaking.”

Childermass regarded Mr Norrell coolly. He could handle a lot of what Norrell spouted at him, but he, like any other man, had his limits, and Mr Norrell was _this_ close to crossing them. Childermass wet his lips, and then, after careful consideration, slowly said, “if nothing else, Mr Norrell, accept that what I did, I did with best intentions, always keeping in mind what I could gain for you and gain for the furthering of the revival of English magic.”

Norrell worried his lower lip and started pacing up and down, which he was not very good at. Then he made a beeline to Childermass's bedside, and said to him, “do not venture on the Roads again, Childermass. It's not respectable.”

Mr Norrell turned to leave, but then said, over his shoulder, “you're useless to me indisposed. Get well soon.”

From any other person, those last words would have sounded like the pleasant hope of quick recovery, but from Norrell's lips it was a simple imperative. _Get well soon_.

Mr Norrell disappeared through the door, leaving Childermass alone with his thoughts.

He tried to get up but his legs failed him. Growing increasingly annoyed with himself, he tried to sort his thoughts on how he could make Norrell _understand_. He _knew_ , of course, that that road of thought was a futile one. If his, indeed, four-and-twenty years of service had thought him anything, it was that Norrell's views of magic were imperturbable. Strange or no Strange, King's Roads or not, nothing could convince him. Not after John Uskglass had disappointed Norrell so deeply, so profoundly.

The swaying rhythm of his thoughts which he kept repeating eventually lulled him back into a restless sleep.

**

The third time he awoke he felt infinitely better. The drowsiness was gone, as well as the strange feeling of something vital within himself _lacking_.

John Segundus was sat at the right side of his bed.

“Good... day, sir,” said Childermass, as he noticed that while the room was still lit by nothing but natural light, that light was less bright and had a more golden hue to it.

Mr Segundus cleared his throat before he spoke. “Good afternoon.”

He ducked his head and smiled, the sight of which filled Childermass with a kind of satisfaction.

“It's good to see you,” said Childermass, but the words came out all wrong, and were followed by a silence that hung in the room and began to grow slightly uncomfortable.

Then Segundus asked how Childermass was feeling.

“Better,” he said, and he propped himself up on his elbows, sitting up. He was tired of lying.

“I have to admit,” began Segundus reluctantly, “that I am quite curious to hear your own account of what happened on the Roads.”

Childermass saw that Segundus's large eyes grew even wider with unbridled wonder and badly suppressed curiosity when he spoke of the Roads. He could not suppress a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth. “I see you have not given up your magicianship, after all. I wonder how Mr Norrell took your actions.”

Segundus's cheeks turned a tint rosier than they had been before.

“I was enchanted,” Childermass then said. “By a Faerie, not five minutes after we had arrived. I am not sure on the particulars, but I believe she tried to enchant me in such a way to make me admire her. I do not claim to understand how, or why; only _that_ it happened.”

“And then Mr Strange disenchanted you, is that correct?”

“Ormskirk,” Childermass affirmed. “ _Revelations of Thirty-six Worlds_.”

“You're remarkably well read,” noted Segundus.

“Am not. I just listen and take in what happens around me. You're the one who is well read – if such a person even exists compared to Gilbert Norrell... But there is one thing I do not understand, if you permit me the liberty of asking; if Jonathan Strange disenchanted me, why was I still... indisposed when we returned?”

Segundus wrung his hands together, and his voice seemed a tad higher in pitch when he responded, his excitement evident. “That is exactly what Mr Norrell, Mr Strange and I have been discussing, after Mr Strange remarked that an enchantment is different from a _curse_ in several ways. A curse would likely not be disspelled by Ormskirk, as his spell is aimed at enchantments specifically. Privately, I have reached the following conclusion. I think that this Faerie lady, when she noticed that Strange was trying to thwart her, put a slumbering curse on you that would take effect upon your leaving of Faerie: so when you re-entered England, the curse was… triggered, so to say. However, I think she failed to bring the curse to its completion, as it was a quite useless in the way it presented itself.” Mr Segundus turned even pinker, and he hastily corrected himself. “Not that it was not extremely inconvenient and an inexcusable insult and violation to your person and–”

Segundus scrunched up his eyes, mentally flogging himself for the stream of incoherent words that left his mouth.

Childermass raised a hand to indicate it was all right, assured him no harm was done, and bade him to continue.

After Segundus had recollected his thoughts, he did exactly that. “If her enchantment was to make you fall in love with her,” he stuttered, “then why would she proceed to curse you with speaking Dutch? It's not particularly a language known for its courting qualities, as Italian or French would have been...” here he trailed off, sounding uncertain.

“I’d like to know the particulars one day, but I… no matter – forgive me for asking you outright, Mr Segundus, but what have you _done_ to me?”

While listening to Mr Segundus, Childermass had noticed that the gaping feeling had gone – in fact, he felt more complete than ever.

Mr Segundus remained quiet for a moment, obviously perturbed by this question. Nevertheless, eventually he started, “I... _think_ I momentarily absorbed your soul in order to remove the curse. Then I put it back, of course,” he added hastily.

Indeed, during a long night of thinking on the matter, Mr Segundus felt quite confident that this was what he had done. It had not been as relatively simple as he had initially thought it was – but he had not shared these thoughts with Mr Strange or Mr Norrell just yet. He could not explain it, but by feeling that in some way or another, the _conditions_ for this kind of magic had been met.

He had not known how he had acquired the twigs, nor had he consciously known in what manner to arrange them in the room. He felt empowered and controlled by a force stronger than himself, whispering instructions in his ear. He had had no choice but to obey.

Childermass took in this information, and then asked the only question that mattered. “Did you put _everything_ of it back?”

He had not expected this reaction of Segundus: he had perhaps expected confusion, or slight hurt at Childermass's doubt of his magic (rasing a new important question: how had Segundus learned and performed this kind of practical magic?) but Segundus turned white, with an undertone of nauseous green.

Segundus said, “I have been asking myself the exact same question. I have been feeling quite different after performing the magic. Certain aspects of my character seem enhanced. I am able to sympathise, empathise even, with Mr Norrell, while deep within my heart I know I support Mr Strange's view of magic. But I also seem to understand how to become one with shadows in a room, and I was never good with animals but horses seem better disposed towards me.”

Childermass swallowed and said, “I feel finally complete again in your presence.”

Such a simple remark, irrevocably true; underlining his previous emptiness.

“I think,” Childermass said, after a moment, “that we have both arrived at the conclusion you absorbed part of my soul.”

And as is the custom with physicians, they damage what they do not know how to cure, and it was as such that Dr Goodsmith interrupted the conversation, once again demanding privacy.

Childermass sighed and warned the physician to refrain from mixing laudanum with his drinking water again.

Goodsmith looked appropriately found-out.

 

[1] Childermass was actually saying the text to a Dutch song, “Aria, voor den Verliefden,” meaning “Aria, for the ones in love.” _Hans Michel Goedbloed zingt de voornaamste en nieuwste liederen_ , S. & W. Koene, Amsterdam, 1805.

[2] _Oh spirit! Leave this body!_

[3] It is unfortunate no-one has yet undertaken the writing of a biography on John Segundus, as his competence in recognising enchantments and curses goes unparallelled. See _Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell_ (1832) by Susanna Clarke for a more detailed description of Segundus’s magical abilities.

[4] Among which the infamous shooting by Emma Pole, as well as some previous instances. Those are, however, stories which must be told at a different time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really need to figure out anchor links for those footnotes. Sorry for the scrolling.
> 
> Next parts are already written but need some looking-over -- I promise all our dearies will get some answers soon.
> 
> Thanks for reading! x


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